It is known that having an epidural increases the time it takes for a woman to deliver her baby.

But new research suggests it may prolong the birth for longer than originally believed.

U.S. researchers found some women who are given an epidural during labour take more than two hours longer to deliver their child than women who don’t get the pain relief.

Having an epidural can increase the amount of time it takes a woman to push out her baby by up to two hours

‘The effect of epidural can be longer than we think and as long as the baby looks good and the women are making progress, we don't necessarily have to intervene [and perform a Caesarean section] based on the passage of time,’ lead author Dr Yvonne Cheng, from the University of California, San Francisco, said.

Dr Cheng, who reported her findings in the journal Obstetrics and Gynaecology, says doctors were traditionally taught that women who receive an epidural will take about an hour extra to push their baby out.

This is because they are unable to feel when they have a contraction and find it hard to feel if they are pushing effectively due to the numbness the epidural causes.

RELATED ARTICLES

Share this article

For her research, she compared data from more than 42,000 women who delivered their children in San Francisco between 1976 and 2008.

About half of these women received an epidural while the other half did not.

Dr Cheng and her colleagues discovered that 95 per cent of women who were having their first child got through the pushing stage within three hours and 20 minutes if they had not had an epidural.

In contrast, for those who had had an epidural, it was five hours and 40 minutes before 95 per cent of women had delivered their babies.

Some 95 per cent of women having their first child get through the pushing stage within three hours and 20 minutes if they have not had an epidural. For those who have an epidural, it can take five hours 40 minutes

For women who had previously had a child, 95 per cent without an epidural had delivered their baby within hour and 20 minutes of beginning to push.

For those who had had an epidural, the figure was four hours and 15 minutes.

Overall, the researchers found the second stage of labour took about two hours longer when women had an epidural.

For women who have a more typical, quicker, delivery the epidural probably adds less time, Dr Karin Fox, from the Baylor College of Medicine and Texas Children’s Hospital, told Reuters Health.

Dr Christopher Glantz, a high-risk pregnancy specialist at the University of Rochester Medical Centre in New York, cautioned that although the health of babies in the epidural and non-epidural groups was similar, mothers tended to have more complications if they had longer labours.

‘It would appear that the upper limit of what can be tolerated is greater than what was previously thought, which takes away some of the impetus to intervene (with C-section) in what appears to be a premature fashion,’ he said.

In the UK, a woman who is having her first baby is expected to give birth within three hours of the start of the second stage of labour.

As a result, if birth is not imminent after two hours, doctors will consider intervening.

If a woman has previously had a baby, she is expected to give birth within two hours so intervention is considered after an hour.